when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

It is far better to be happy than to have our bodies act as graveyards to animals.

I just tried everything out - I mean, everything. Even my sexual orientation; I was just searching for what I really wanted. And I didn't quite know.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

People always leave traces. No person is without a shadow.

Being witty was the only side effect of being depressed that was working for me.

My profession is about as far away from growing up in southern Illinois as you can get.

It takes 3 weeks to break a habit, 6 weeks to develop a new habit and 36 weeks to hardwire this new habit.

Question: How do you know you're God? Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself.

In the land of ideas, you are always renting.

The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.